I clean the steamed up mirror in the bathroom, I pull myself out of my own person, and look at myself through the eyes of the other me. Then I scold myself, actually, I scold her, the other one. I blame her for all the things that only the two of us know about. I wipe away one of her tears, maybe two. After that we make up and cry together, understanding how much we can rely on each other. She looks at me and stays silent. Through her eyes I get the confidence that I need. We smile. I glance at my watch, it's already 10 minutes past. I have to go, but we'll see each other again, tomorrow. We have so much more to talk about.
(Translated by Cristina-Bianca Ion / University of Bucharest, Faculty of Foreign Languages and Literatures, MTTLC, year I / Corrected by Silvia Petrescu, coordinator of the translations)Real Fiction is a collective project started in 2013 by Florin Piersic Jr. The concept of Real Fiction continued to exist as a Facebook group, after a volume of stories was published at Humanitas Publishing House. (In July 2021, the group has 6.800 members.) The authors write ultra-short stories, with the texts limited to 500 characters (in Romanian, so the length of the English translation might be a little different) - a flash-fiction exercise on a topic that changes every few days. The group's coordinators are Florin Piersic Jr., Gabriel Molnar, Răzvan Penescu, and Luchian Abel. (Drawing by Adrian T. Roman)
Versiunea în română a acestui text se poate citi aici, în rubrica Ficţiuni Reale. 
